Friday, April 07, 2006

Long-Range Goals

"People at the meeting looked at the other civil rights organizations [NAACP, SCLC, CORE] and saw that they were money-oriented...This meant that on occasion they would sacrifice principles in order to keep the money coming in....

SNCC [in 1961] also recognized that we had to build a people's movement. We had to develop leadership outside our own, to carry forward the struggle...whether or not SNCC was around....

I disagreed strongly with the idea that it meant SNCC would become unimportant....[although] later it was used to negate [SNCC's] power...because of a fear of power itself, a lack of understanding about how to use power....

The cry for community control is a false one within the present structure of this society. Nevertheless, action geared to achieving community control can help people realize the impossibility of that goal if the proper political education goes along with the action....

The lack of an ideology would become a serious problem for SNCC when the problems of voter registration and segregation of public accommodations were largely resolved with passage of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts....Our long-range goals, the kind of society we wanted to see built, the question of whether the fundamental problem facing black people was strictly racism or a combination of racism and capitalism, ... these issues had to be dealt with and failure to do so [eventually] tore the organization apart."